A Prayer

[Photo: Vaughn Jarvi]

This year, we're collaborating with writers across the Augustine Collective, a network of student-led Christian journals, to bring you a series of short devotional articles during this season of Lent, the 40-day period prior to Easter. Find this series also published by UChicago's CANA Journal and UC Berkeley's TAUG.

by vaughn Jarvi, university of chicago

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.

Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.

Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.

O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.

For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Psalm 51:10-17 ESV

Lord, I thank you that in Your mercy, and through the sacrifice of Your Son, You are a God that sanctifies. 

Even in times when I do not dwell on Your truths, or do not feel Your hand guiding my life ahead of me, Lord, You are there. My own sin and straying should damn me, but You have delivered me from my own guilt through Christ’s blood. Lord, You have delivered me with a love and a mercy I could never deserve. In so many ways, I ignore all that was done for me through Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Let me now declare: “It is finished, the price has been paid.” I pray that my reflection on this sacrifice would be daily. Lord, the cross shows the weight of my sin, but also the depth of Your love: help me to live in this every day, and to know that in Your love, you guide my steps. God, You have set me free: in thought and in action, help me to turn toward Your ways rather than my own.

I pray that gratitude for the cross would always open my heart further, Lord. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and align my spirit with yours. Sanctify me every day, Lord, and help me to turn from things in this world that dishearten, that tempt sinfully, that create apathy within me. Lord, help me to sacrifice brokenness to You, and to know that You make me whole: it is Christ’s blood that cleanses my sinful and broken soul.

Lord, help me to resist toughness. Help me to speak to you my heart in prayer before I cross my arms in defiance. 

Help me to remember that the broad strokes of my life, the unanswered questions, and the details of tomorrow are all in Your hands alone. God, I thank you that I don’t have to handle or settle any of this on my own. I trust in You, Lord – Your will be done in my life, every day.

Lord, in this Lenten season and every other season, help my days, my work, my heart, my relationships, and my words to glorify You.

God, I love You, and I pray that the song on my tongue would always be one singing aloud of Your righteousness. Let it be a sweet, sweet sound in Your ear.

In Jesus’ name, amen.

Vaughn Jarvi is a third-year undergraduate studying Music at the University of Chicago.